Brainstorming the competition problem

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It’s fairly clear that more must be done to ease the competition between new and established players. Facility degradation and production fees have been introduced in order to begin solving this problem, but they are still not enough.

I’d love to hear some other ideas and get feedback on my own.

I think that the following criteria should be met:

  1. established players should have incentives to move away from competition with newer players.

  2. players should not be able to be entirely self sufficient via use of all optimal production designs.

  3. any mechanism introduced should add something to the game in addition to meeting 1 and 2.

  4. any mechanism should make sense within the galaxy and not feel bolted on.

In order to meet this I have been considering a faction allegiance feature. Players may be aligned to a faction, or no faction. On spawn, a player would be aligned to their starting faction. Players may change faction via payment of a fee to both the faction they are leaving (fine) and the faction they are joining (registration fee etc…).

Factions charge additional production fees to players who are aligned to another faction (foreign production fees). Factions could charge additional market fees to players from another faction when they sell things on the CX (import tarrifs). Factions may charge transit fees to players from another faction who move a vessel through their space. Factions could charge fees to players who belong to another faction when they construct facilities on a planet owned by that faction (foreign infrastructure levy).

If the fees are high enough relative to the cost of the product then domestic production of the item would gain an advantage over players moving in from other factions.

A faction could offer short term subsidies towards these fees for new players diminishing until zero over about a month. The faction is gifting a colony, materials, and two ships already, so this could be passed off the same way.

Factions could periodically change their stance towards the others and raise or lower fees associated with that faction. Trade disputes / successful negotiations.

Players could choose to have no allegiance to a faction and would thus face fees from all factions. In order to incentivise removing your allegiance, your faction could charge fees on production and construction that is made in space that does not belong to any faction. Security fees etc…

Colony Modules should degrade and effect production efficiency. This represents decay of communication equipment, power generation, connecting modules etc… I feel a Max of 25% multiplicative hit to efficiency could suffice. A repair mechanism should be included with this. If not repaired after a certain time frame the colony should decay, all facilities should be deconstructed, and all inventory and resulting material moved to a contact for pickup.

I’m on a lunch break and on mobile so may not have fleshed everything out properly or been unclear in what I’ve meant.

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I disagree. You are proposing a way too complicated design.

  1. If older players want to keep making T1, their problem.
  2. That’s a game killer. Removing self-sufficiency will bring all economy to a halt and only organized groups will survive. The issue right now is exactly that. Montem was forced to import Prom’s water and rat while Prom had a pat on the back being blessed with perfect water supplies and fertility in an attempt to promote trade between the two. Result is obvious : Prom inhabitants milked Montem of money since they were self-sufficient.
  3. No, I said above why I think not.
  4. This what you propose is utterly complicated, can’t even understand the mechanic :smiley:

I’m confused about this competition which you are stating because most market prices are quite huge compared to production prices, that makes me believe we are not at saturation, so I do not see a problem.
Of course prices will never be competitive for people who think the so-called quadruple market price is OK and they produce things from it and end up realizing someone can sell three times cheaper than them. It’s NOT about old players, it’s about understanding basic economics.

The biggest problem are essential consumables. The current design is fine, more or less with an exception. It should not have been done with essential consumables. All main starting planets should have had relative similar fertility/water in order to avoid the very thing your solution will increase : people’s production going off-line and dying off due to the fact that they can’t sell things in time, can’t afford fuel, trips take 3 days and so on.

Why forced trade? Players will always diversify but when you cut their legs and make them dependent then abuse and enforce max prices in exports, then implement taxes to siphon even more money out of them, of course it causes grief and they end up feeding the NPC.

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On the other hand… Prom has literally no excuse for abusing the MM. That’s why Montem was starving cause instead of following dev’s design and people flying their dw/rat to Montem to sell it and buying prefabs they decided it’s more profitable to sell RCO to MM and thus zero consumable competition on Montem :slight_smile:
So… people never follow these designs… but don’t create handicaps in the process.

It’s like in jurassic park … life finds a way. Give them equal chances and they will amaze you with their solution.

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Solution can be easily taken from EVE, where older accounts usually mean experienced char and access to more profitable activity.

At PrUn universe its can be easily implemented(without introducing new mechanics) via MMs at each level, not only at 1 and 4. Make a difference in profit betweeen levels significant and players with access to higher tier production leave low level markets naturally, without any restrictions and weird rules.

But all this is useless while developers trying to avoid MMs at all. No MMs -> no alternative sources of income -> tendency to 100% selfsupply -> no external trade -> dead universe(as economic game).

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After the recent spurt of new players from FtP ended, the game meta has become “sell to the MM” in order for newer players to continue on. I was one of those and that presents two problems in my view:

  1. Selling to the MM as the only means to make money is not a fun game mechanic as it’s just plain boring to mindlessly churn out BTA on Mont.

  2. Removing or lowering the MM would also remove the only source of making a profit for new players.

There needs to be a new money faucet mechanic for both new and experienced players. Currently the only money faucet is the MM and it’s profitability depends on what profession you choose and where you can initially settle. More experienced players get a huge bump due to the MM paying a ridiculous profit for high end items with a hope that trickle down economics work (as highlighted in the most recent blog), and I thought we determined that it doesn’t work 20 years ago. Personally I am in favor of removing MMs but something has to replace it, both at the entry and experienced levels.

It could be NPC “quests” of deliver X to planet Y (which experienced players like to poo on) which get increasingly more difficult - it’s essentially a MM, but requires fuel, adds a fun factor, and without a MM on the markets it opens the opportunity to actually make moving product to other markets a need rather than the current meta. I haven’t put a lot of thought into a solution other than that, but if I had to put money down on why new players are leaving, it’s that selling items to the MM (or even knowing that is the way to make money) isn’t a game mechanic that keep them in.

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I’m going to take a moment to lay some clarity on the criterion I stated.

Established players (those with multiple colonies and some control over their supply lines) have a great advantage over new players when producing the same materials on the same planets. At this stage, there is no mechanism to encourage an established player to move away from competing with new players.

I have a colony on Montem which produces all the B-series prefabs I require. I have a good amount of control over my supply line. I produce my own PE on Montem, extract my own FEO and LST, smelt my own FE, and make my own C with GRN from my Promitor colony. The materials which I purchase from the market are consumables, H, FLX, O.

Obviously, I can produce prefabs for far less than a new player because I can spread the profit reduction along the length of my supply chain. If I want to make my BSE 7 NCC cheaper, I can take 1 NCC from my LST price and 5 NCC from my FE price. This then flows on to my FEO and C pricing. A new player cannot influence the price of FE or LST directly (unless they already have SME and EXT) thus, the 7 NCC reduction is a larger relative hit to their profit.

Something needs to influence me to move away from producing prefabs on Montem in order to allow for new players to have a chance at competition.

The feedback I have already received has managed to miss the key qualifier in this phrase: “via use of all optimal production designs.” Players should always have the capability to be self-sufficient if they so desire.

There are many planets in the galaxy, however there is a single, optimal production solution. The galaxy is finite and all planets are known. PrUn is a solvable system.

There needs to be some mechanism which increases the number of optimal solutions. We will never be able to remove the possibility of an optimal solution. What we can do is greatly enlarge the pool of optimal solutions. Rather than having a single solution that is optimal for all players, many other factors should influence each potential solution such that many optimal solutions can co-exist.

These two points really go hand-in-hand. Any mechanism which meets criteria 1 or 2 should not feel like it is there solely to force competition or make it hard for established players. A solution should not be a form of punishment.

Now, on to the remainder of my initial post.

Faction Allegiance

When you spawn on Promitor, you spawn with allegiance to Insitor Cooperative. This faction provides your starter package, it makes sense. If you wanted to move to another faction, you need to pay a fee to break your ‘contract’ with Insitor Cooperative. You’d then have a ‘administration fee’ for signing a new ‘contract of allegiance’ with another faction. These fees would exist to prevent swapping factions willy-nilly.

Insitor Cooperative controls Hortus and nearby systems. The 2-3 systems immediately surrounding the home systems would be considered core systems. The next 5-6 systems would be considered perimeter systems. Outside of that would not be owned by the faction. A useful analogy would be Eve Online’s High-Sec, Low-Sec, and Null space.

Factions would act to protect (at this stage only economically) those who have signed a ‘contract of allegiance’.

There is a little to unpack in this statement, especially with regards to intent.

Additional fees could be charged to players who do not belong to the faction who owns the CX they are attempting to sell on.

This would give a slight advantage to the faction’s players when it comes trading on their CX. A player from IC could bring a shipment of RAT to Montem and list it on the CX there. They would pay a fee upon listing the sell order. They would not pay a fee when filling an existing order. When buying from the market, this player would not pay this fee.

The intent is to 1) slightly increase the price of imported goods thereby increasing the competitiveness of local production, and 2) have real implications for belonging to a particular faction.

Higher production fees could be charged

This is to encourage players from faction_a to colonize planets owned by faction_a. At the moment, established players generally seek to have a Promitor colony for consumables, a Montem colony for prefabs, and sometimes a Katoa colony for other things. A player from Castillo-Ito Mercantile should be considering Gibson over Montem for prefabs construction. Sure, Montem would still be very much viable for them, but the fact that they belong to CIM rather than NC should yield a slight disadvantage when producing on Montem relative to NC players producing the same material. They have a choice: 1) stay with CIM and have a slightly higher cost for prefabs, or 2) switch to NC for slightly cheaper prefabs, but more expensive whatever they were producing in CIM space.

Fees could be charged when constructing a facility.

This, again, increases the cost of doing business when producing in systems not owned by your faction.

As an example, Promitor RAT shipped to Montem by an IC player should be cheaper than Montem RAT sold locally because of the difference in fertility and specialization. However, Montem RAT should still be competitive when sold locally. This should encourage local production which would act to mitigate the control which foreign production has over the local prices.

At the moment, Promitor could stop shipping RAT to Montem and everyone on Montem would need to buy from the MM. In fact, Montem faces frequent price spikes and troughs for consumables prices because local production is not sustainable in the spikes, and too slow to react in the troughs. If there were a mechanism to allow local production to remain competitive against foreign production, the spikes and troughs could be flattened.

Its bed time and I’m exhausted so I’ll come back and finish this when I can.

Thanks everyone for the replies already made.

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@Prdgi

I don’t see a faction allegiance money sink helping new players in a significant way. New players don’t need a slight advantage, but rather a money faucet other than the MM.

Production fees, facility degradation fees, and as you suggested fees charged when constructing a facility hurt the new player more than someone who has moved up a few tiers and is making bank selling to the MM rather than pennies on the dollar as a new player.

The bottom line is that starting on any planet other than Prom (which is not shockingly full most of the time) is a time consuming and boring path to getting to the mid game of selling stuff to the MM at a greater profit to make it to end game.

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Competition is mostly a problem because of the way the game rewards richer, more veteran players. It’s also something that unfortunately stacks in the veteran favor for each link in the chain. Bfabs (PP1) require FE, FE (SME) requires C, C (INC) requires GRN, GRN (FRM) requires H2O, and all inputs (EXT/COL/RIG) require time and consumables. If one player buys DW (for the sake of simplicity, i’ll treat DW as the abstract representation of all consumables from here on out) at 50, and another player buys it at 40, then there is a 20% cost increase on each step. This results in an N*M type cost inefficiency where N is your extra cost and M is the number of links in the chain of production from raw resource to output. Whoever has the cheapest basic consumables is going to have immensely lower costs after 5 iterations of resource conversion (H2O -> GRN -> C -> FE -> BSE).

DW is never free, it always has a cost. I know you are aware that DW’s cost is a fraction of it’s own production. But cheaper DW results in cheaper everything. DW is the essence of all output. We are merely converting DW into other things throughout the universe. In some cases we convert DW to FE, other times DW to more H2O, and other times DW to some other basic consumable like WIN.

In a perfect universe, DW, RAT, and all other consumables will have a market with millions of units stockpiled on it, squeezing it into the tiniest of market spreads. The consumables index would be the life force of the universe, the anchor point that no player could ever budge due to the massive stockpiles of DW sitting on the market waiting. If there is anything that PU’s economy is based on, it’s DW.

In that perfect universe, the spread for DW may be 42-44. The lower that spread, the healthier everyone will be. Players could buy hundreds of thousands of units of DW while speculating a price increase.

With only a 5% spread between buy and sell, the market for DW will be completely shut out to any player who isn’t making DW at the full 5 experts on both resource extraction and FP. With only 4 experts, your operating costs will add up and you’d be better off buying from the market. You’d sell DW at a loss.

My point that I’m trying to get at is that as competition arises, profits get a little tighter, percentage wise, and experts are currently able to reduce costs throughout a chain by as high as 22% (equivalent to 28% increased efficiency) per link. The closer the market spread is to that 28.4%, the more shut out players are.

As players settle planets that are extremely high cost, but have high concentrations of resources, the market will shift. Players who can make H on a gas giant at 92% concentration with 5 experts will be able to convert 1 unit of consumables (some mix of DW/RAT/OVE normalized to 1) into 55.2 units of H each day. Players who make H on Umbra (17% concentration) with 0 experts will able to convert 1.36 units of consumables (due to inefficiency) into 10.2 units of H each day.

Suppose 4 players settle the H gas giant and start pumping out H. They create competition among themselves and the market prices drop. Players on Umbra will not be able to compete. Umbra will become a desolate, dead colony.

Now the gas giant has more capital requirements to invest into. It costs significantly more to set up a gas giant collecting H with 5 experts. That is no easy task. In fact, being that first person to settle that gas giant is probably a wonderful warm fuzzy feeling because now you have something that you can sell cheaper than anyone else and you have a wonderful sense of progression. As players progress, it will happen more and more. And as high tier planets get settled and developed, we still want new players to be competitive right? So we add building degradation. Building degradation is fundamentally a cost, or tax, that players must pay every so often for each building they own. That tax is a fixed cost of DW based products every X unit of time. I can very easily calculate that fixed cost for a planet and compare it to another planet of a different tier to get my overall average long term degradation fees. We could still pick out the best planet, considering all costs, and use that as the defacto supplier of one specific resource.

To loop your idea into the mix, I feel that adding in faction taxes, tariffs, export taxes, etc, is a form of adding a fixed cost to producing on an external planet. If the system is implemented, the only way to protect the new players is to have taxes, fines, etc, so large that the new players could establish an ecosystem within a small faction space where their operating costs are the lowest in the galaxy. Would that be a good thing though? What if players wanted to move out of that space, how do they get out of the newbie bubble where their price points are protected? The moment they leave their bubble, they are back into a new problem - mature markets cannot be entered so easily. The taxes will be able to be calculated in such a way that players could still figure out what the most optimal planet would be and settle that one. If taxes shift from month to month, this may cause frustration as players who invest significant time/money into an outpost only to find that new taxes caused them to be non-competitive.

There are two forces I’m talking about here that are long lasting forces which manipulate price ranges. The first is experts - who simply reduce the input consumables costs by increasing efficiency. Players with less experts can and will be shut out of a mature market. This would, in the worst case, cause players to have to invest large amounts of resources into building something at a loss for over 1000 work-days in order to achieve that 5th expert - then and only then could they compete in the market. This is, mechanically, a barrier-to-entry.

The second force is planetary extraction rates being higher in higher tier planets. Each time a lucrative planet is first settled, the market will begin to shift until the entire universe is sourcing the material from that planet. They could sell at a rate that is just below the profit margin of the next planet and own the market. Given 10 years, this would probably happen on PU.

Logistic challenges do play a huge part, especially now. This is why lumber is regionally priced - it is easy to chop down trees and ship wood short distances. It is incredibly cumbersome to ship wood long distances. Therefor being close to your market gives you a substantial edge in anything that has very low value/(weight|volume) ratios. In EVE, this was Tritanium’s role. It could be mined anywhere, but it was a beast to move. It was used in everything. To contrast PU, DW is used in everything but has an amazing value/weight ratio.

The big thing preventing an experienced player from destroying the T1 market right now for new players is the fact that they just aren’t. The MMs help a lot, but overall I’d say there aren’t a whole lot of veteran players dumping high efficient basic T1 materials on the market. No, instead they are using those basic consumables that they get so cheap to make T2, T3, or T4 products - and then selling those to each other and/or the market (Hello WR!). There are some exceptions, and each time a veteran player drops a payload of super cheap goods, they are potentially shutting players out of the market. This be the case for self sustaining players on Montem who are making FE. If they are using their own RIG to get Montem H2O (at an abysmal 11% efficiency), and using that to make their own DW, RAT, C and FE, they are never going to be able to compete with someone who is sourcing their H2O based products out of Etherwind or Boucher. There is simply no way.

I would propose that the competition problem can be alleviated by changing or removing experts and/or normalizing the extraction rates of all planets quite a bit. Experts could turn into a different role - instead of increasing efficiency, they could reduce efficiency while increasing productivity. This would allow players to use 5 experts to raise their operating costs per unit of output in order to raise their total output. Currently experts are in a limbo “we kind of regret” phase - you get more efficiency for being on a planet longer, but you get less efficiency due to building degredation? They cancel each other out. As for normalizing the extraction rates - that is a tough call. It is currently the biggest incentive to settle distant planets. With the concepts I listed above, even the slightest increase in efficiency of resource extraction rate can cause some planets to be completely worthless (namely the starting planets). The difference between a 20% and 28% extraction rate could, in some markets, be enough that the 20% extraction rate planet cannot compete. So perhaps the extraction rates should be normalized somewhere in the vicinity of a range of 25%. A gas giant produces 100% H while a rocky planet produces at 80%. Other avenues to explore here may include more diverse planets with strategic uses where logistical simplifications give enough efficiencies to counter the built in extraction rate bonus (eg having H2O and FE on one planet is better than great H2O and great FE on two planets far away from each other).

It all depends on how the devs want the game to work. Do they want RPG elements to it? EVE tried this, they have a skill called “Production efficiency” which reduces cost of building things by up to 10%. If you wanted to build anything seriously, you had to have that maxed. There was absolutely no way around it. RPG elements that give competitive price advantages are super dangerous. Do they want a universe that progresses over time and universally becomes more efficient? Well, then maybe the starter planets should all be very competitive H2O producers and the rest of the universe should be void of H2O. H2O makes DW, and DW is the life force of the universe. If the most lucrative place to make H2O is where you start, players can always make DW and stay competitive (not a very fun solution, but a good one). Do the devs want players to reach out to the edges of the galaxy to get resources? Then it’s a value, weight, volume, and FF efficiency tweak. Universal progression is much more involved and will likely attach itself more in the ship building phase. The first freighter class ship that can deliver mountains of resources to the furthest edges of the galaxy will be a game changer, especially if some fundamental resource is quite heavy.

Hope this wasn’t too long.

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In my opinion one of the most effective ways to reduce the competition on starting planets is to reduce the amount of old players there. We not only want that from a competition perspective, but also from a game design perspective: We have seen that the initial planets fill up quite fast and every plot counts. We don’t want to add initial planets every now and then.

So here are a few ideas on how to achieve that:

  • Limit the amount of bases a player can have. We could limit the amount of bases to a fixed number. Abandoning or selling a base would be possible. If we add more mid- and end-game content it might be quite common for older players to move somewhere else and freeing a plot on a starting planet to be able to participate in the late game.
  • Limit expert usage on starting planets. If we reduce the maximum usable experts to 3, experienced players only have the advantage of a single expert compared to a newbie in the same field, that starts with 2. The new player also starts without building degradation.
  • Reduce base area and add more plots on starting planets. We could reduce the base area to 40-60% of that of a normal base and add additional plots instead. That will support more new players per starting planet and limits the potential output of the bases of more experienced players.
  • Faction dividend. I guess we all can agree that the start is the hardest part for a new player. What if we support them with a weekly faction dividend that is being paid for from the production fees everyone pays. The dividend could be distributed in a non-linear way, e.g. new players would benefit more than older players. Players might not receive any dividend when their company exceeds an age of 30 days for example.
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All this ideas dont do anything with source of problem: trading at starting planets profitable and this profit significant enough to attract old players. Most of the cheap goods come from external planets, production on exchange worlds is just subgoal. Main goal of colony - provide storage and remote trading. Im sure, even limit on number of colonies dont force old players to leave at least Promitor exchanger.

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1.Allow all players on starting planets to be self-sufficient ( dw/rat wise - same concentration/fertility ). DO NOT enforce trade with tier 1 essential consumables.
2.Remove MM buy orders on manufactured products ( RAT, DW, MCG, Bfabs etc). Keep MM buy orders on all ores, water, agri products but calculated to give a minimal profit if abused .
Everyone will be able to sustain itself like this and then make some industry for exports. Nobody will starve and products can be kept on market indefinitely.
3. Material concentrations on outer worlds/self-sustainability actually make products this cheap. Also lack of buying capacity or self-production of so-called goods.

You will have a working economy and products will be manufacured only when they are needed. Also production costs are zero if all consumables are owned… regardless whatever and whoever says they are not. Production costs are bigger than zero only if you factor the infinite buy orders from MM otherwise there is no reliability that your goods will be purchased ever.

I support this because : I have 4 bases, I produce nothing extra that I can’t use. The only extra products come from excessive mineral concentrations that I don’t actually need :smiley:

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I think @Aldin and says it well in both of his posts, although we come to opposite recommendations because for him, the optimal universe seems to be many independent self-sufficient players, and for me the optimal game is many inter-dependent specialist players.

Here’s the paradox:

  • to help ween old players off of T1 to make space for new players, you have to penalize specialization and incentivize exploration
  • to help discourage self-sufficiency and promote interdependence, you have to penalize expansion and incentivize specialization

I agree with @rain9441 's idea/analysis. In the real-world, newbies have the advantage of being ‘light’ and ‘nimble’ meaning that they have low overheads. Large corporations have good marginal-cost efficiencies (the cost to make each additional unit is low) but massive organizational/management costs to keep that volume of production going. In PU, a single human is seemlessly managing logistics across the entire universe at constant returns to scale!!

I think the key is in creating some sort of game mechanic that allows a player to turn on a finite number of experts that apply across all planets that increase efficiency while at the same time making multiple different types of buildings within the same base inefficient.

The dividend for newbies seems a little bit like a cheap ad-on, although perhaps giving players a tax break on production taxes for the first 30-90 days can be a good planet-level or faction-level incentive.

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Well, hmm, I think the experts add some nice value to the game and promote specialization.
I don’t really agree that competition should be regulated at all in form of more taxes or tariffs or whatever.
I generally disagree on most of your points of regulating competition, regulating experts on starter planets, reducing base space and so on because of one main reason :

  • Example from EVE, of course : Jita, main trade hub was built by players not by devs. With 2k people online would not guarantee sales for your products, sometimes had to wait even days. You can’t force dependencies in markets and expect good things or even sales. You risk enforcing these dependencies in markets and total rage follows because people will not produce or don’t want to produce cheap things, they all want to be rich and to be able to sell whatever useless products they are making and expect to be paid a fortune for them.

You advocate it’s an economic game but intertwine dependencies mechanics for people to buy and sell and make them born customers. This does not fly with me very far. I think ability to become suppliers is nice addition with the presence of experts and players will develop to such a design if given the opportunity.
Rather than making them born customers/buyers, make them free and without obligations and they will reach out and build your markets based on demands, supply and consumption.

Mechanics should NOT decide gameplay they should give equal opportunity.
A player should be allowed to :

  • play alone.
  • have specialized or rainbow industry if that is what he wishes.
  • join a corp and have specialized/rainbow industry withing it.
  • be independent or dependent.
  • participate in market or not if that is what he wants.

So much discussion about how new players can’t breach the markets. Problem is the design enslaves them to the market and it’s not a healthy design to be honest.
I was very annoyed from the start on the fact I had to sell products to buy essential consumables and the daily sales volume on my products was literally null for days. Old players were telling me to ship them to Prom and sell then when I had like 2k money (a spit in the face!).

@nigelhenry and others about experts : I think 5% of old players actually dive in markets, probably even less and around now supply chains and mass producers being to appear or been producing for a while ( NS, MCG, FLX, etc ).
And to be honest I fail to see the point you are mentioning about profit margins and older players being able to sell cheaper… I look at all markets and ALL manufactured products have 3-5 times the production costs.

Explain to me please where is this competition please. Start with PG. Production cost 8 sell price 18.
You actually tell me I should be forced by some game mechanic to buy this?

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No and yes.
No, you should not be “forced” to buy it, but, yes, the game mechanic should be tweaked to force the market price of PG to a number that makes you want to buy it as the first option.

I agree with the approach of the game creators. You should be able to do all of the options you propose, but interdependence is more “fun” and the point of MMO. If you want a game where playing alone is the optimal strategy, there are desktop and mobile games that you can download and install.

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I agree on all points! Players should be able to do whatever they want.

However, not in the context of newbie players. To stay within your EVE example: Imagine an total EVE noob, starting out at JITA and trying to thrive there. It wouldn’t work, you even said it yourself, that this is a harsh environment.

Eventually we want players to build their own Comex and they can enforce whatever rules they want, they can trade whatever they want and there certainly won’t be any MMs. I would be the first to applaud when they manage to build a PrUn version of Jita. But: Player-built Comex are not a thing yet, and we have to provide means to trade in the meantime and we also have to care about the newbies or else the universe will be empty. That is the very reason for the restrictions of the starter planets.

Besides, there are local markets! If you want to break free from the starting planets feel free to move to a non-faction system.

We won’t do that, because if every starting planet has the same specs the game is boring. We want the factions to feel different and unique. If a specific starting planet does not suite you, there is always the option to COLIQ and chose another one.

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Great thread to post my first post on the forum.
After a bit of gameplay I searched for if the issues I saw were being discussed anywhere and here it is!

There are comparisons with EvE but let’s not forget that many of EvE’s current features were added when there was already a huge stable player driven economy. The main problems with PrUn do currently arise from there not being a huge stable player driven economy, and to attract players that want to play a game with a player driven economy, but are willing to help create that when there is not one. So there are MM’s but they are a kludge and not desirable, to fix the problems of MM’s systemically will create solutions that are a cancer that will remain when MM’s are removed.

To continue comparisons with EvE, this post nails it really: Brainstorming the competition problem

But nobody is mentioning the main reason new and veteran players can both enjoy the game in EvE, which is that the production and destruction of resources flows from newb to veteran in some vital ways.
One of these is that in EvE, veteran players will be heavily involved in destroying assets, products and resources that have a huge production chain behind them. The huge battles and defence of assets in EvE mean there is a constant demand for stuff that new players can enjoy producing by setting up safe mining of Trit, and production of low tier, and just hauling for the big guys. I don’t see anything analogous in PrUn, but I am new and may have missed it.

For these reasons I think comparisons with EvE miss the point here, although they are great ways to illustrate the issues behind why starting players will feel discouraged and leave PrUn.

I suggest one main drive to separate mature markets and veteran players from directly competing with new players and that is a compelling reason to explore outward, while making that exploration expensive somehow that is far beyond the means of a new player yet rewarding in another way. This exploration also would have to depend on new players produce and so support their production.

Basically you could substitute exploration here with any sink - in EvE it is PvP. I don’ think boring sinks like disappearing costs into fees taxes or asset degradation can be realistically applied to veterans but not new players in an immersive way.
Something like I suggest would inspire both new and old players to remain in the game, which is the main problem to bootstrapping into a player driven economy where this can work.
Anyway - first post over. Hope not too much of a rant… Hello! :slight_smile:

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Welcome! Yes, the comparisons with EVE are flawed sometimes. We don’t have PvP as one large resource sink and I really don’t see a single sink in PrUn that can get as big as PvP. So we have to design multiple smaller sinks that make up for that. I like the idea of exploration and it is on the roadmap. We will make it expensive, that is for sure, but it can only be one resource sink of many to come.

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We don’t have PvP as one large resource sink and I really don’t see a single sink in PrUn that can get as big as PvP. So we have to design multiple smaller sinks that make up for that. I like the idea of exploration and it is on the roadmap. We will make it expensive, that is for sure, but it can only be one resource sink of many to come.

It is encouraging that the designers post very quick and meaningful responses to player requests & ideas!! :smiley:

I think @deMangler’s is on the right track. Introducing a negative/mundane sink like depreciation to drive ongoing production rather than a positive/exciting one might be acceptable, but doesn’t push the game along.

Here’s an idea… why do people invest time in farmville? what do they gain??
answer: The “farm” is a visually-fulling product of their hard “work” that they can both enjoy themselves and show off to their friends. I have never been allured to play Farmville myself, and like many other PrUn players, I my imagination is idiosyncratic enough to get excited about racking up virtual currency and contributing to building projects that are represented by no more than a couple lines of text… but this may not be much of an incentive to the average player. Even AirlineSim has the visual representation of the hubs which expand with time, and you do get a sense of pride seeing the logo of your airline on the arrivals and departures board . :blush:
A very simple picture for each building on the planet screen (think the city view or throne room view in Civ 1-2) should do the trick and should be pretty light in terms of code.

This leads naturally to the second idea… a LEADERBOARD of some kind.
There is probably no more powerful incentive to buy and sell than competition!!! :grin:

The closest we have to PvP economic competition is the markets, but the fact that most veteran players are completely absent from the public markets is evidence enough that they don’t have much of a pull.
While a simple leaderboard of $$ of production is a very easy start, since “result” is already being calculated per player, I think showing the number of units of each building (or each industry) produced either per company or per corp is a more holistic way to give every single player in the universe something to strive for.
For me, I think some way of “seeing” a showcase of the top 5 planets again the very simple “city view” mentioned above should do the trick.

Just my thoughts…

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I believe the major issue of the game at this stage is lack of deepness and diversification on product development, as there is not much motivation to build higher level technologices as there is no liquidity on the market for those.
This is understandable at this stage of the game development, as those higher level activities (ship building, technology of asteroid mining, orbital and deep space structures etc) are not there yet.

Typical coporate dilemmas could be taken from the real world and currently they are focusing around the questions of exploitation and /or exploration, in other words short term or long term thinging, the necessity of innovation, trying out new technologies, increasing production efficiencies.

I believe some elements could be implemented, which could burn significant resources of developed companies in hope of reaching higher level profits and influence in the galaxy.

For example:

Employees:
They are currently only slaves with no wishes, no consumer trend of the population, no motivational elements, no issue of hireing costs - altough in the corporate world one of the biggest effort to hire and keep good employees.
Ideas to change it

  • introducing salaries of the work force - ability to hire work force, or get workforce from the competition offering higher salaires - on well developed planets it could be more expensive to run companies and harder to find personal, could lead developed companies to relocate their factories, or could give opportunity of other companies on an other planet to be more cost efficient and beat older companies on a developed planet. (same idea with the energy cost)
  • same idea in case of distant, but source rich planets where emloyees should be hired probably on higher costs, so workforce should have lower motivation and higher salaries until certain infrastructural elements are not built
  • introducing motivational elements of the population or work force - more diversification of basic and luxury consumables, building better habitats or entertainment buildings to keep employees happy on the long run.

R&D
The technological tree is given, altough one of the most competitive thing in corporate life is stay on top of technology - lot of investment is necessary in new technologies, in new ways of productions, in finding better resources etc. I would introduce research or licencing know-how from other more developed companies, or the option of technology spionage. This could be an entry ticket to produce higher level or rare technologies. Given technologies should be also less efficient to produce (for example more raw material is needed) etc.

Security
Another problem of companies could be to keep their secrets (innovations) or keep operational and transport security to defend it from highjacking stock or transports from competitive companies or from general piracy . This could diversify also on a higher level, for example safer infrastructural designs on planets, new ship designs, the need of organising convoys and consider security, the need of considering production location from security perspective, securing transports, cost of exploration with etc. This could create a new profession to provide security services, rent escorts or specialise on safe transportation.

Energy
Energy consumption and diversification of energy costs - higher costs when there are more production companies on the planet.

That is it for now.

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Having now spent a mere few days watching things during this period of gameplay it seems that quite a strong factor in supply chains not manifesting and competition not catalysing is… kind of a psychology and timing thing. But I can see why the setup as is, is a good one that it would be a shame to change.

For example, I have been producing FF from collected H and bought HE3 on Umbra, as a first base as a newbie.
Now the supply of HE3 dried up maybe a day ago, in all exchanges, the advice floating, which I assume reflects kind of a community habit of thinking, would be to COLIQ if I could. My urge is to wait it out and see what happens, but that is just me being a bit weird. It would be good if there were something in the feel of the game that would incentivise me sticking with it, not because it is optimal, but because it enriches the game to have the kind of diversity of players that includes non-optimal (in a min/max market sense). It in fact stabilises things. Especially when thing are as unstable as they are now - players need an incentive to not just change what they do so quickly - this leads to feeding the instability. This is just an example I think I have seen the theme reflected in chat a fair bit.
I feel that with a larger player base this would take care of itself, but also, we cannot just wait for that - maybe some storyboarded examples of various entrepreneurial behaviour linked to some gameplay opportunities to encourage a more diverse, play style, and more importantly, give a context for that being meaningful and rewarding.
Not suggesting more lore or backstory - that is just fluff. Also not liking leaderboards much myself. I am thinking more of a thematic or contextual kind of change… I know, not very specific ideas but trying to pin down the issue in a slightly different way here…

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